March 1, 2010
In 2009 we began work with Roger Ebert to replace his voice using material he had recorded as video commentary for a series of films on video cassette. Roger had seen the George Bush website and thought that if we could clone one voice we could clone his.
At that time unit selection synthesis was very sensitive to recording issues and we refined our techniques to make the system work with found audio. This expertise was central in CereProc’s commercial voice cloning system release a couple of years later.
Thanks to Roger we received wonderful publicity for the work which helped inspire voice cloning work in the field. An approach which is now very effective with neural approaches to speech synthesis. Roger Ebert who died in 2013, was a wonderful person to work with and is sadly missed, but his determination to produce a synthetic voice that sounded like himself had a big impact on the technology now available for those with voice communication needs.